Abstract
Bilinguals need to select the right language for the particular context they are in, but how do they do this? One possibility is that they exploit visual cues from the context such as people’s faces, so that recognition of the face increases the availability of the language associated with that face. This chapter first examines the degree to which bilinguals activate multiple languages and how this is constrained by linguistic cues and then discusses three new lines of research that investigate visual language cueing. Specifically, these new research lines suggest effects on language processing of (a) the language associated with familiar people’s faces (e.g., German for Angela Merkel); (b) language that people associate with the race of unknown faces (e.g., Chinese for an Asian face, English for a white face); (c) language associated with cultural icons (e.g., Russian for a picture of the Kremlin).
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Hans Rutger Bosker is thanked for very insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Hartsuiker, R.J. (2015). Visual Cues for Language Selection in Bilinguals. In: Mishra, R., Srinivasan, N., Huettig, F. (eds) Attention and Vision in Language Processing. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2443-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2443-3_8
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